The Hidden Shame in the Global Industrial Economy

The Hidden Shame
of the Global Industrial Economy

Where do the raw materials to
build our paneled offices, airplanes, and cell phones come from? Maybe you really don't want to know. A lot of
them come from plunder, of a kind we'd like to think came to an end long ago.

Conquistadors

In the 16th
century, Hernando Cortez sailed to Mexico seeking gold for the Spanish empire.
He found a lot of it, and seized it without compunction, killing any Aztecs who
stood in his way. Today, that kind of plunder may seem antiquated-abhorred by
the community of nations. Of course, we still suffer the depredations of
various transnational criminal cartels and mafias. But those are the
exceptions, the outlaws. Today, no self-respecting nation or corporation would
engage in the kind of brutal decimation of a whole culture, simply to seize its
treasure, that Cortez did. Or would it?

In fact, the plundering of
precious metals and other assets is far more prevalent
today than in centuries past, and on a larger scale. Now it's not just Spain
and a few other military powers seeking global dominance, but scores of nations
seeking cell phones and teak furniture, that are seizing materials from native
cultures-some of these materials in quantities that the conquistadors could
never have imagined. Now it's not just silver and gold, but coltan (for those
cell phones), copper, titanium, bauxite, uranium, cobalt, oil, mahogany, and
teak. And now, in place of the extinguished Aztecs and other now decimated
cultures, it's hundreds of still surviving cultures that are being overrun, in
perhaps a hundred countries. And most significantly, while the looting is still
done by invaders from across the oceans, it is often sanctioned and facilitated
by the victimized peoples' own national governments.

But while the plunder is greater
now, it is in some respects less openly pursued and less visible than it would
have been for Cortez, had the technology to observe it been available in his
day. The conquistadors would likely have reveled in seeing their exploits shown
on TV. Today such publicity is avoided, for compelling reasons:

First, plunder usually entails
invasion, and in the centuries since Cortez the world's nations have moved
toward nearly unanimous condemnation of unprovoked invasion-as reflected in
their widely shared shock at the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There has been parallel
progress in recognizing the wrongness of enslaving other people or simply
killing them for their property. There's an evolving appreciation of human
diversity, and of the idea of a global (as opposed to European, or nationalist)
community. Yet the incentives for seizing the wealth of others are as
economically irresistible today as they ever have been, and the means of doing
so are now far more widely available. So the seizing continues, but not
necessarily by military assault. That's not to say there aren't still places
where the job is done with outright killing, as the following pages will
detail. In Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria, there have been cases in which
people who opposed extractive operations on their land were given Cortez-style
removals from the discussion. But where the scrutiny of the global media is
present, the means are more indirect, and appear to be accidental. People
living near uranium mines that have left piles of radioactive waste on their
land die of cancer in unusual numbers, and their children have unusual numbers
of birth defects. Indians whose land has been taken over by oil-drilling
operations are slowly poisoned by petrochemical contamination of their water
and soil. Those living downstream from large gold mines find their drinking
water laced with cyanide. Food sources are destroyed, as are sacred places-and
people die of spiritual, as well as physical, deprivation. Those kinds of dying
don't make the evening news.

Second,
the plunder is less visible now because it rarely need be witnessed by the
people who end up with the wealth-the major purchasers of gasoline or gold
chains or tickets to fly on aluminum-bodied planes. In gold rush days, the
lucky miner who found a nice nugget could buy a fancy watch. In the modern
economy, the man with the Rolex has likely never been anywhere near a gold
mine. The big extractive industries are far from the urban centers where most
of the affluent live. In poorer countries from which much of the world's
mineral and forest wealth is taken, the extractive operations are often in
remote jungles or subsistence farming regions-homelands to people who are
largely left out of the global dialogue and trade.

Finally, there is the unspoken
disincentive of the world's media giants to expose the exploitative nature of
the industries that provide the raw materials of the economy that pays their
way. Nearly all media, whether print or electronic, are funded by advertising
for consumer goods that too often originate with raw materials largely taken
from indigenous land or from ostensibly protected parkland. It would perhaps be
unfair to say the media are part of a conspiracy of silence, because in all
likelihood most media executives rarely stop to think about what fuels the
economy that allows them to profit. But it's fair to suggest that there's a
reluctance to undermine the foundations of the economy on which their whole
business rests.

Not all extractive industries
operate in the shadows. Many are honest businesses, run by people who are
attentive to the human and environmental impacts of their operations. But those
businesses are far too few. By some estimates, for example, some 80 percent of
the logging done in Indonesia-one of the largest producers of wood in the
world-is illegal. Some of the largest mines in the world, dumping thousands of
tons of deadly poisons into their surroundings each day, are operating without
the consent of the people whose land they have taken over.

Big Footprints

Mining and logging operations-the
"extractive industries"-aren't just small pin-pricks in the Earth's skin,
though they may appear that way on maps. Apologists may think of them as small
holes discreetly drilled in large territories, for which small compensations to
the impoverished inhabitants of those territories may be sufficient. But in
fact, extraction has far-reaching impacts and costs. Because nature is not
static but involves continuous movement of wind, water, and wildlife,
contaminants released by mines can cause Pandora-like destruction.

One of the most alarming forms of
contamination is that of heap-leach gold mining, a modern technique that
involves pouring rivers of cyanide on huge piles of low-grade ore to extract
the gold. Cyanide is extremely poisonous: a teaspoonful containing a 2-percent
cyanide solution can kill an adult. In February 2000, a dam holding heap-leach
waste at a gold mine in Romania-the Baia Mare gold mine owned by an Australian
company, Esmeralda Exploration-broke and dumped 22 million gallons of cyanide
into the Tisza River. The poison flowed more than 500 kilometers downstream
into Hungary and Serbia, wreaking what some called the worst environmental
disaster since the Chornobyl nuclear explosion in 1986. Unfortunately, this
event could not be written off as the last gasp of an outmoded technology.
Heap-leach gold mining is on the increase. In Peru, the Yanacocha gold
mine-second largest in the world-sits atop the South American continental
divide, from which any similar breech would run all the way to both the
Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. And in Tanzania, the Geita mine has just been
sited on the Nyamelembo River, which drains into Lake Victoria. One of the
largest and most valuable fresh-water lakes on the planet, Victoria is
essential to the economies of Kenya and Uganda as well as Tanzania. A Kenyan
environmental professor, Wangari Maathai (now the country's environment
minister), described the Geita mine as "the most insensitive economic
undertaking I have ever come across," explaining that "it is not just a matter
of poisoning people. Very soon, the European Union will ban all fish exports
from East Africa just because some toxic elements have found their way into the
fish, and it will be a great economic loss to the local people whose life
depends entirely on fishing."

The kinds of spills produced by
modern mines shouldn't be compared to the relatively petty crime that occurs
when someone dumps dry cleaning fluid into the sewer drain, or drops his old
batteries into the garbage. Mine waste sends huge plumes of poison into the
world's rainforests, groundwater, and food. In Zortman, Montana, in 1982, the
Zortman-Landusky gold mine spilled 52,000 gallons of cyanide into the local
groundwater, and it was discovered only when a local mine worker smelled
cyanide in his faucet at home. Cyanide was the agent used to kill Jews in
Hitler's gas chambers. Today, in West Papua, Indonesia, a gold mine owned by
the U.S. company Freeport McMoRan dumps 120,000 tons of cyanide-laced waste
into local rivers every day. In Papua New Guinea, the Ok Tedi copper mine,
which was built on the local people's land without their consent, dumps 200,000
tons of waste per day into the Fly River and has brought the once biologically
rich region to ruin.

There are other means, besides
rivers, by which damage from extraction can be spread. Wind, in particular, can
be as dangerous a factor with big mines as with broken nuclear plants. Uranium
mines produce huge piles of crushed ore waste, or tailings. According to the
Center for World Indigenous Studies, the most common health risk associated
with uranium mining is breathing radon-222 gas, which will continue to seep
from the tailings for thousands of years to come. In Australia, the tailings
dam of an abandoned uranium mine was burst by monsoon rains, and subsequent
dispersal of the waste by river and wind has polluted an area of 100 square
kilometers of land-driving out the Aboriginal people who lived there. In the
U.S. Southwest, radioactive waste from an abandoned uranium mine owned by El
Paso Natural Gas Company has blown toward an area used by Navajo Indians for
shepherding.

In some cases, the extraction is
not at a single point at all, but takes place over a wide area. Logging
operations have decimated some of the world's most biologically valuable
forests. Many of these operations are either illegal or are sanctioned by
corrupt national governments over the desperate objections of indigenous
inhabitants. In Bolivia, in the late 1990s, the government granted logging
concessions covering 500,000 hectares of Guarayo Territory and 140,000 hectares
of Chiquitano de Monte Verde Territory. In Cambodia, illegal logging has led to
severe deforestation, flooding, and destruction of rice crops-and to the
displacement of people who depended on those forests for subsistence. In
Liberia, in the year 2000, some $100 million worth of timber was cut down and
sold, mainly to European consumers, to enrich the dictator Charles Taylor and
to buy arms for his henchmen. In Indonesia, the looting of forests has reached
new levels, with about 2 million hectares disappearing every year.

Buying Silence

Cortez did not
have to worry about bad PR. Companies like Shell Oil or Freeport McMoRan may do
their extraction in remote places, and with the tacit acceptance of the global
media, but they can no longer escape the attention of activists and groups like
Amazon Watch, Rainforest Action Network, and the Mineral Policy Center. Shell
was burned badly when it was accused of collusion with the Nigerian government
in the murder of the Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who had dared to protest
Shell's ruination of his people's homeland. So, the major extractive industries
have learned to become more discreet about how they take what they want. One of
the most common strategies is to offer employment in the mines to indigenous
people who are not well informed about the hazards, and to develop a dependency
that the workers and their families are unable to break even when their health
begins to break-a contemporary form of indentured servitude. An Aborigine
writer, Vincent Forrester, describes how this dependency was established at the
Ranger uranium mine in his people's region of Australia. Mining royalties are
paid to the government, not to the local people. (Most mining companies don't
pay royalties to anyone at all.) The government then supplies the community
with essential services, but does not inform the people about the effects of
the mining on their land and health. "This dependency, I believe, is a form of
ransom," writes Forrester. "White Australia says to the under-serviced,
fledgling outstation movement, ‘You can have money for Toyotas, for bores, to
help you set up, but if mining stops the money stops too.'"

A more hardball way of buying
acquiescence is simply to find individual members of the local community who
are willing to publicly support a proposed mining project in exchange for a
small payment, which in an impoverished area can be a large inducement. The
offers open rifts in the local community, causing enough disarray to allow the
project to gain a foothold. In the late 1990s, for example, the Navajo Times reported that the HRI
corporation, which wanted to open a uranium mine near the Navajo community of
Crownpoint, New Mexico, had arranged to give lease payments to some of the
Indian landowners living in the community. According to a report by Chris Shuey
of the Southwest Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, the total
amount of the payoff came to $367,000. The population of Crownpoint at that
time was 2,700, which meant HRI was paying $136 per citizen to begin a process
that would use the community's underground water-bearing strata as a medium for
"in situ leach" processing of uranium-turning the water into a "pregnant
solution" from which the uranium would be extracted within one-half mile of
several churches, schools, businesses, and most of the homes in the community.

In Madagascar, the
Anglo-Austrialian mining giant Rio Tinto has tried to buy off the natives for
even less. Rio Tinto wants to mine 40 kilometers of coastal dunes, bulldozing
an indigenous homeland that is also a habitat for numerous rare and endangered plant
species. The company's strategy has been to invite the villagers to dinners at
which they can eat and drink while watching PR films that extol the proposed
operation but make no mention of likely damage.

In hundreds of mining or logging
operations around the planet, the main economic incentive for capitulation is
the lure of jobs. Where people are poor, that lure of short-term cash can
easily blind young workers to the long-term impacts of the project on their
culture and health-and on the long-term sustainability of their local economy.
In the Arctic, Inuit communities are now divided about whether to welcome more
intensive oil drilling. Those who see a threat to their traditional way of life
have put up strong resistance, but it's rarely enough to fend off the
incursions, especially when their own national governments have been bought
off. In a globalized economy, the buying-off of governments has become
widespread. A few years ago in India, for example, the indigenous Bhagata,
Khond, Konda Reddi, and Samantha communities found themselves targeted by
foreign companies interested in the bauxite (aluminum ore) deposits on their
lands. Indian constitutional law protects indigenous peoples from unwanted
exploitation of this kind, but that did not stop the state of Andhra Pradesh
from secretly inviting the companies-and giving them leases-to begin mining.
The opposing parties have been litigating ever since.

Is There Really No Alternative?

When economists
talk about "extractive industries" they're usually referring to mining, oil or
gas drilling, or logging-essentially, the use of heavy machinery to cut raw
materials from the planet. The concept could easily be broadened to include
pumping water from aquifers, hauling fish from the oceans, shooting monkeys for
bushmeat, or collecting honey from wild bees. We focus here on mining, oil
drilling, and logging because they have been so heavily concentrated in places
that are both the homelands of the world's marginalized peoples and the
habitats of the most threatened ecosystems. These industries are therefore the
most direct-and least regulated-assaults of industrial society on the Earth's
cultural and biological stability.

To some extent, the lack of
restraint in these industries may reflect an implicit belief, in the
governments of industrial nations, that the genie long ago exited the bottle,
and that trying to undo any damage it has done now is as unrealistic as trying to
undo the damage done by the seizing of Indian territories by Europeans two or
three centuries ago. But the idea that redressing past injustices is now "unrealistic,"
too, makes a questionable assumption-that the descendants of the conquered
Indians have long since been assimilated into the modern industrial economy and
share the same benefits as the descendants of their conquerors. Yet, the
reality of places like the Navajo reservations in the U.S. Southwest belies
that assumption. Native American communities are far more impoverished, with
far higher rates of disease, unemployment, and suicide, than the rest of the
country. And it's on Native American lands that the most blatantly exploitative
extractive operations are concentrated. A similar observation can be made of
the oil-rich Ogoni lands of Nigeria, or the Guarayo territory of Bolivia, among
scores of others.

The political inertia that has
allowed colonial-era racial distinctions to be perpetuated in the twenty-first
century economy has also allowed outmoded assumptions about industrial
productivity to be perpetuated. The prevailing belief is that if we want to
continue having the rich lifestyle to which we are now accustomed, we have no
choice but to keep on drilling and digging in the places where we already
are-and, indeed, to commence new drilling in any place where more resources can
be found. If the Inuit are hunting caribou in the Alaska National Wildlife
Refuge (ANWR), but the war on terror and the fueling of American Hummers and
Expeditions demands oil and there's oil under ANWR, sooner or later the Inuit
will have to step aside-will have to forget their antiquated ways, learn to
speak English, head south, and find jobs at Exxon gas stations or Wal-Mart.

Such assumptions have been amply
discredited, though you might never know it from following the mainstream news
media and its conservative-dominated commentary. The discrediting takes several
forms, each of which involves the exploding of a persistent myth about the
materials economy:

In other words, population
momentum (the unavoidable population growth of the coming years even with
maximum stabilization policies), plus rising standards of living across the
planet, will necessarily drive up demand for raw materials. Historically,
economic growth has meant soaring material consumption. But the idea that this
link must continue assumes that the efficiency of materials use must remain
constant, which it need not. If cities were redesigned to be more compact, for
example, the quantities of materials required to provide housing and transport
per capita could be greatly reduced while actually improving the quality of
urban life. As asphalt and gasoline use declined, so would the psychic and
physical ravages of traffic congestion, auto accidents, air pollution, and
suburban isolation. At the same time, growing efficiency in energy use, both
from technological advances and from changes in consumer behavior (how about
trading in your Expedition for a Prius, or your leaf blower for a rake?) could
vastly reduce the per capita demand for oil or aluminum without compromising
the pursuit of happiness. For the 2 billion people who are poorest, hopes for a
better life do not have to require further impoverishment for those of their
indigenous counterparts whose land is being mined or deforested.

"Meeting
the need for increased supply of materials requires taking more out of the
ground."

When the benefits of more
efficient design and use have been exhausted, we may indeed need to increase
the supply, at least until population has stabilized. But to assume that the
increase must come from the ground falsely assumes that the new materials must
be virgin. In the long-term ecology of the planet, nearly all materials are
eventually recycled, and now we need to do that in the short term as well. The
mines of the future will be, increasingly, the cities rather than the
rainforests. Already, in some areas, aluminum recycling has reduced the need
for bauxite mining by half.

"Mining
or timbering in indigenous areas is cheap."

This argument is similar to the
one employed by Wal-Mart, which says it's economical to get poor people, who
have few alternatives, to clean toilets and wash floors for cheap wages. That
thinking is just one expression of the more general myth that industry can
profit by not paying the externalities, or social and environmental costs, of
production. But while economic practice remains entrenched in reactionary
doctrine, moral consciousness has come a long way since the days when few
people had any qualms about slavery. Exploiting cheap labor is a form of
quasi-slavery, and the hundreds of organizations dedicated to raising public
sensitivity to that have long since brought us past the point where social
costs can be ignored. The true costs of extractive industries will inexorably
become more internalized-for example, in requiring oil companies to bear the
medical costs of diseases brought by their polluting of indigenous water
supplies. As that happens, the prices of oil and other raw materials will rise,
and there will be more incentives to develop sustainable substitutions-of
renewable energy for oil, of recycled metals and wood for virgin, and of more
efficient use for more supply.

That's not to say the mining of
minerals and fuels, and the harvesting of trees, will not continue to some
degree into the indefinite future. But in a healthy economy, those activities
will be done with far greater care, on a smaller scale, and only in places
where permission is granted out of choice rather than compulsion-and, even
then, only in places where there will be no lasting injury to any human or
natural community. Ultimately, it will cost no less to site a mine in an Indian
reservation or rainforest than it would to site it in, say, a suburb of Paris
or Dallas.